as someone very much interested in learning French primarily for reading I enjoyed this writing of yours
Thank you! It was on my mind for years, it is definitely just as interesting to think about language learning as it is to, well, actually learn a language. :p
This is a great start :) As mentioned in the post, even people experienced with systems have trouble with it. And thank you for the comment, I've always loved your website (every once in a while, I go and check your "appreciated" page, it's wonderful)
Thanks so much, I'm delighted to see you on here as well. Your website is fascinating and I love the section of the books!
You admit, "[t]his may mean nothing in the grand scheme of things." Computer scientists working in Java, Python, or C# hardly need to care what a syscall is. The Tiobe Index confirms these as 3 of the top 5 most popular general-purpose languages, some 27% of the market.
See https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/.
You make a good point about the paradigm shift from assembly languages -> abstracted languages. But it's definitely interesting to see how this shift affects (admittedly specific instances of) CS curricula. Compilers and computer architecture courses seem to have gone down a similar path, so I wonder how the general CS curriculum will look 5, 10 years from now. Anyways, thank you for the thoughtful reply :-)